Whose Girlfriend Will The One New Female STAR WARS Cast Member Get To Be?

Women make up 51% of the population of this planet. We can extrapolate that even in a galaxy far, far away and in a time that is long ago that ratio is somewhat the same. So why is Star Wars Episode VII so very, very dude-y?

This film introduces eight major new characters to the saga (there are likely many more characters, but only the really vital ones were at the table read today - leads and important supporting characters), but only one of them is a woman. And the law of storytelling averages shows us that her role in this film will, in some capacity, be as a love interest to one of the seven men. She might even be caught in a love triangle, reminiscent of the original Star Wars trilogy (never rule out useless echoes and symetry in either Star Wars or JJ Abrams films).

Having only one female lead is pretty standard for the saga - both the original and prequel trilogies allowed only one major woman into the mix. This time it might be different depending on the size of Carrie Fisher's role - we might actually have two female leads! That would be groundbreaking, I guess.

Representation is a tricky issue. You want to let storytellers tell the stories they want without presenting them with a checklist of things/people they must include. At the same time you kind of hope that, seven movies into a saga that spans almost forty years in real time, somebody would have figured out that women like to see these movies and also like to see themselves onscreen and also can do most of the things in a movie that a man can do. Some of them can even pee standing up, if that is a major story point.

Hey, maybe there's a real reason why most of the new cast is male - perhaps they all meet in the Tatooine Boy's Choir - but it's disappointing that Star Wars, one of the major pop cultural movers of our time doesn't seem to understand that our attitudes towards women in film have changed, and that it not only should reflect that but maybe should help continue bringing female characters to the screen.

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While some may say he is the greatest critical mind of his time, Devin Faraci humbly insists he is only the voice of a generation. He has been writing about movies online since there was a 21st century.